Work Experience

Get a great head start

Where possible, Imagination likes to support young people to find out more about the realities of working in our industry. We offer opportunities for 1-2 weeks work experience which you can apply for below. Please click ‘Apply now‘ on the opportunity you are interested in and attach your CV and cover letter.

If you are applying for technical work experience, make sure you give us lots of information about any electronics or software projects you have undertaken as this will make you stand out from the crowd. Sometimes if we have the availability we will offer extended internships opportunities for students who have already done a 1 or 2-week work experience placement with us.

Work Experience Opportunities

We are currently reviewing all applications.

Due to the amazing response we received we are not accepting any applications till further notice.We appreciate your patience during this process.

Easter Work Experience:

1 Week (20th August- 24th August)

2 Weeks (3rd April to the 13th April)

Summer Work Experience:

1 Week (14th May-18th May)

2 Weeks (9th July-20th July)

Hardware Graphics – Kings Langley

Join an exceptional and inspiring team of engineers involved in the design and verification of PowerVR’s cutting edge graphics processors. The team’s design will become the actual silicon which is the GPU, the work comprising the architecture and specification, design in VHDL, synthesis (turning code into logic gates), verification using latest methodologies such as UVM, and creation of internal tools and flows to support the process. Our customers then use our design in their system on a chip which might be found inside your mobile phone.

Students who join us will be attached to a small team and will gain hands-on experience by undertaking a short task which will make a real contribution to the GPU. Prior experience of Python/another coding language will be beneficial.

QA Test Execution – Kings Langley

PowerVR QA Test Execution ensures the products Imagination Technologies sells are meeting customers’ expectations and industry standards. Our team members have the closest experience of using our drivers in a customer-like scenario, starting from the setup of a Linux/Android/Windows system, to the real end-user interactive experience.

By using both internal and real off-the-shelf products as reference platforms, we help our Customer Engineering team providing the best support to our partners. Simulated SW platforms as well as FPGAs and Emulators are then used when working on cutting-edge HW that didn’t reach the market yet.

The team is deeply involved in the release process for SW drivers by running tests into the Continuous Integration loop – where the support by Tools & Automation is crucial in building quality to a release level. On the other hand, it works as gatekeeper during release test cycles, where we put a stamp on a driver that was elected for the market.

Students who join us for a work experience will be operative from day-1 in being part of the team activities for results collection as well as helping with the testing process.
As theory states, the best testers are fresh minds with no pre-concepts, so you might even end-up running your own test plan.

PowerVR Graphics Software – Kings Langley

Work for a week in a global technology leader that creates world class graphics IP cores powering various electronics devices ranging from smartphones, tablets all the way to automotive. Members of the Software Graphics teams from around the world collaborate to develop a complex software stack driving the graphics hardware. We write device drivers in C and supporting tools in Python. You will have an excellent opportunity to understand the day to day activities undertaken by the engineering. You would gain hands-on experience by undertaking a short task and contributing to graphics software development.

Tools & Automation – Kings Langley

PowerVR Tools and Automation enable quality assurance and are at the heart of the graphics processor design, developing the products that test the products Imagination Technologies sells. Our team members are privileged in seeing the entire lifespan of a graphic chip; from testing the initial design concepts right through to being the release gatekeeper of the finished article and beyond – once the product hits the shelves, it may come back to us as part of our Production Units test farm. Developing Web Applications, Software Tools and Infrastructure solutions, we utilise Python, PHP, C and C# to facilitate and automate test flows on Computing Grids, Emulators, FPGAs, Virtual Platforms, Development Boards and much more, with exciting new test platforms always being introduced. Whether a test run has been smart scheduled by ourselves or hand kicked by a developer, using our tools we have to display complex detailed results in an optimal way. We strive to give as much debug information as possible and ideally, automatically scheduling further testing to get to the root cause of an issue and providing an automatically set up debug environment for the developers.

Students who join us for work experience will be given an understanding of our entire testing pipeline and then immersed within one of the teams, either manually or programmatically help them test their own test tools. If you want a sense of what a company does in order to release its products to market, working within the Tools and Automation team is the experience for you.

Datapath Group – Kings Langley

The Datapath Group implements, researches and proves the correctness of hardware which implements mathematical functions. The group is founded on the premise that hardware can be made more reliable, faster, smaller and more power efficient through the application of mathematical and logic reasoning. We act as an internal consultancy to Imagination’s divisions; gathering requirements for designs or architectural questions, performing research and design before returning optimised and correct hardware and software models.

The work experience week includes an overview of the group from the team lead, a demo room tour of the myriad of Imagination products, a taster of the extensive training material we use for new joiners, discussions with various team members about the nature of their work. The bulk of the week will be spent answering a particular mathematical question that is currently part of our development work, potentially using Microsoft Excel for any experiments.

Prerequisites – doing A Levels in Mathematics, Computing or Electronics.

Here’s what some of our work experience
students had to say

Oliver

My placement was absolutely great. All the staff were warm and friendly and I felt very welcome there. I was given a mentor who gladly spent some of his time during the week to explain to me what the company does and what his line of work entails, but also taught me the concepts and specifics behind what he does in order for me to understand how the whole system works. What I enjoyed the most was learning C++. It challenged me and it was rewarding to be able to solve problems. I had a great time and I learned so much in one week.

Charlie

I thoroughly enjoyed my placement, I feel that not only did I learn a lot, but I began to feel like I was working with the team by the end. The most enjoyable thing was seeing the products of my work develop, and seeing the finished circuit. I learnt many things, about designing the schematics for circuits, about laying out PCB’s, about soldering with very small components, and about the testing process in order to make sure the final product operates as intended.

Thomas

I thought my placement was extremely interesting, and I enjoyed the experience in a working environment. I also enjoyed being given a project to work on for the week, and was happy with, and proud of the result that we had achieved by the end of the week. I learned more about the company and its structure, I also learned more specifically about the FPGA department, and its role in the process of chip design. I also learnt that working can be very enjoyable and fulfilling, helped if you work in a good company with nice people!

Matt

There were a lot of challenges as the work went into far more detail than anything I’d ever done before. But the help I got from the group was really helpful. The bit I most enjoyed about my week was when I finally got to grips with the concepts and the tools of what I was doing, I’d never really seen anything that complicated before and suddenly being able to design something with that level of detail was really interesting. I learnt many things from my work experience, how much work goes into the manufacture and design of a single chip, the type of work I’d be doing if I went into electronic engineering and most importantly that it’s work that I enjoy and something I’d like to do in future.

Need more help?

If you would like more advice on careers at Imagination Technologies then please contact us. If you are a university student please enquire at hr@imgtec.com.

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